China has not bought a bushel of soybeans from U.S. farmers this year. What happens to the crop now?

By Myra P. Saefong

Trump says he plans to talk to China's president - and soybeans will be a 'major topic' of discussion

China hasn't purchased any U.S. soybeans for the 2025-26 marketing year.

For U.S. farmers, abundant rains to fuel a bumper crop would normally be good news - but it won't matter how much they produce this year if China, the world's biggest buyer of soybeans, doesn't purchase any of it.

And amid the trade wars launched by the Trump administration, the U.S. is expected to lose more soybean market share to South America, perhaps permanently.

"This theory of short-term pain for gain down the road - that's just not working, and it won't work," said Ed Hodgson, who farms 1,500 acres of land in Rice County, Kansas. He's been a farmer since graduating from college in 1967.

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans in April to implement tariffs on most countries - particularly key trading partners such as China, Mexico and Canada - Hodgson saw it as a "disaster" for farmers. He was not confident in the promise that tariffs would bring better prices.

In the last five years, China has accounted for around 52% of soybean exports, he noted. This year, it has "not bought a bushel due to tariffs and the trade war," said Hodgson, who usually has around one-fourth of his acreage dedicated to growing soybeans. "Our export market to China has just decimated the price."

So far this year, China has not purchased any soybeans from the U.S. for the 2025-26 marketing year, according to data from the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Last year, as of Sept. 18, China had purchased 6.8 million metric tons of soybeans (1 metric ton is about 36.7 bushels), according to Ryan Urie, director and global head of crops and proteins at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

U.S. soybean export commitments in million metric tons.

Global protein demand has surged over the past three decades, and the U.S. is well positioned to help meet it - but retaliatory tariffs have "blunted" U.S. soybean growers' advantage, according to the American Soybean Association.

The combination of 20% retaliatory tariffs, as well as value-added taxes (VAT) and most favored nation (MFN) taxes, have pushed China's overall duty rate on U.S. soybeans to 34% in 2025, the industry group said. U.S. soybean prices for overseas buyers became "prohibitively more expensive" than South American soybean supplies ahead of the U.S. harvest this fall, it added.

China has increasingly gone to Brazil and Argentina because of the lower prices, said Hodgson. That's market share "we have lost and probably will never get back."

Shift away from the U.S.

China has actually been shifting its purchases of soybeans to Brazil over the past 15 years due to economics, said Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist at StoneX.

When Brazil's real currency became weak, that stimulated expansion of the country's soybean production, which was then cheaper to buy than U.S. soybeans, he told MarketWatch.

"As Brazil expanded production, that meant China needed to buy that much less from the United States each year," Suderman said. At the same time, China has been building its reserve storage of soybeans to use during a time such as this, so it "now physically can divest itself entirely away from U.S. supplies if it chooses to do so," he added.

China has also been pumping billions of dollars into building Brazil's agricultural infrastructure for at least a decade, so that it could grow more soybeans and get those supplies to port in a more timely fashion, said Darin Newsom, senior market analyst at Barchart.

And if China predominately pulls soybeans from Brazil, that does not mean the rest of the world will come to the U.S. to buy the commodity, given the U.S.'s trade wars with other countries, he noted.

"The U.S. cannot make up for lost demand from China," said Newsom, who's also president of Darin Newsom Analysis, a commodity commentary and analysis provider.

Alternative demand sources

There is one aspect of the U.S. market that may help replace some, though not all, of the lost soybean demand.

The U.S. biofuel program for biomass-diesel production is on course to replace Chinese business for soybeans with domestic demand for the crop, said Suderman. Soybean oil is used in biodiesel production.

U.S. biomass-diesel production under the Renewable Fuel Standard was at 4,292.4 million gallons in 2023 - a significant rise from 1,471.7 million gallons 10 years earlier, according to a report from the American Soybean Association.

"Farmers will be dependent on domestic biofuel policy to assist in the large crop [of soybeans] that is anticipated," S&P Global Commodity Insights' Urie said in emailed commentary. "Biofuel policy will allow crush margins to increase and therefore incentivize domestic crushing."

"However, the U.S. will not be able to crush its way out of excessive supply, he added. "The crush capacity in the U.S. is not large enough to consume the soybeans that we would otherwise export."

And the soybean market "can't just flip the switch" to have biofuel demand make up for the lost Chinese demand, said Suderman. It will "take several years to build the infrastructure necessary to absorb the lost Chinese business."

Jack Scoville, vice president at the Price Futures Group, also pointed out that soybeans are already used to make biofuels and animal feed. Demand from those sectors won't be enough and can't be quickly expanded, he said.

China bought around half of U.S. soybean exports, and the "rest of world can't take that volume," he noted.

No solution in sight

For now, it's "too early to quantify the losses for farmers, but it will be substantial," said StoneX's Suderman.

"It will be a significant loss for the industry if China doesn't buy another bushel from us," he said. "It will create storage problems across the Midwest - especially in the northwestern Midwest, where harvested soybeans are typically immediately loaded on a train for the Pacific Northwest ports to be shipped to China."

'It will be a significant loss for the [soybean] industry if China doesn't buy another bushel from us.'Arlan Suderman, StoneX

The new farm-program payments under the Trump administration's One Big Beautiful Bill Act will help, but not until 2026 and 2027, and that's why Congress is considering a "stopgap payout" to farmers, Suderman said.

In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump said the "soybean farmers of our country are being hurt because China is, for 'negotiating' reasons only, not buying." He also said that he'll meet with China's president in four weeks, and that soybeans would be a major topic of discussion.

Trump is also considering providing $10 billion or more in aid to farmers, with funding potentially coming from tariff revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the discussions.

U.S. soybeans harvested in good condition can be stored for a "relatively long time," but a farmer "can't pay his bills with soybeans sitting in storage," said Suderman.

If Trump isn't able to reach a trade agreement that forces China to buy U.S. soybeans in exchange for more favorable access to the vast U.S. consumer market, that means - at least in the near term - that soybean demand will fall far short of production, and prices will be vulnerable to falling much lower, he said.

Prices for soybeans were already at low levels in the U.S. Soybeans for November delivery (SX25) (S00) settled Wednesday at $10.13 a bushel. Based on the most active contract, prices are down by a modest 0.25% so far this year, but that's after losses of 22% in 2024 and nearly 15% in 2023, a Dow Jones Market Data analysis of FactSet data show.

Realistically, Hodgson said he's seeing prices of around $9 a bushel for his soybeans, whereas $14 to $15 would be a profitable level.

'There's a lot of reasons why food is not cheap - and it's not because farmers are making any money.'Ed Hodgson, Kansas farmer

Meanwhile, suppliers have increased input costs - which include fertilizer, chemicals, seeds and farming equipment - year after year, he said.

"I'm sure that everybody in the United States wants cheap food, but there's a lot of reasons why food is not cheap - and it's not because farmers are making any money," said Hodgson.

-Myra P. Saefong

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10-02-25 1619ET